Search Results - Moore, Thomas, 1779-1852

Thomas Moore

Thomas Moore (28 May 1779 – 25 February 1852), was an Irish writer, poet and lyricist, popularly regarded in his time as his country's "national bard". It was a reputation that rested on his ten-volume ''[https://www.musicanet.org/robokopp/moore.html Irish Melodies.]'' In these Moore set to old Irish tunes verse ([https://www.musicanet.org/robokopp/eire/taraharp.htm "The Harp that did once through Tara's Hall"], [https://www.musicanet.org/robokopp/eire/asvanqui.htm "As Vanquish'd Erin wept beside",][https://www.musicanet.org/robokopp/eire/ohforthe.htm "Oh for the Swords of Former Times"] . . . ) that spoke to a history of dispossession and loss. With ''Lalla Rookh'' (1817), a chivalric tale that transferred these themes to a struggle between "Persian fire-worshipers" and their Mughal overlords, Moore achieved wider international acclaim. Translated into several languages and set to music by, among others, Robert Schumann, the verse-narrative established Moore as a leading exemplar of European romanticism.

In England, Moore moved in aristocratic Whig circles where, in addition to a salon performer, he was appreciated as a squib writer and master of political satire. Chief among his targets, in successive Tory governments, was Lord Castlereagh in whose promises of "emancipation" Moore believed his fellow Catholics in Ireland had been deceived. In a verse novel, ''The Fudge Family in Paris'' (1818), and its sequels, he pillories the Foreign Secretary for employing the same "faithless craft" used to press Ireland into a union with Great Britain to accommodate restoration and reaction in Europe.

Wary in Ireland of an overtly Catholic place-seeking nationalism, Moore refused a nomination to stand with Daniel O'Connell and his Repeal Association for the Westminster parliament. His broader sympathies were expressed in his several prose works, including a biography of the United Irish leader Lord Edward Fitzgerald (1831) and the ''Memoirs of Captain Rock'' (1824). Complementing Maria Edgeworth's ''Castle Rackrent'' (1800), the satirical novel is the story, not of Anglo-Irish landowners, but of their exhausted tenants driven to the semi-insurrection of Whiteboyism.

Moore continues to be remembered chiefly for his ''Melodies'' (typically "The Minstrel Boy" and "The Last Rose of Summer"). He is also recalled, less generously, for the role he is thought to have played in the destruction of the memoirs of his friend, Lord Byron. Provided by Wikipedia